Is it possible to have multiple raid arrays using 1 onboard controller?

[nickv360]

I have an MSI Z68A-GD65 ( http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16813130602 )

I currently have

3x 1TB WD black drives
2x 2TB WD red drives (I know these are NAS drives, but I ended up with them)

My WD Red drives are empty, and my WD black drives are all completely full.

Would the following be at all possible:

1. Add the two 2tb reds to a raid 0
2. Copy all data from the 3x 1tb drives to the new raid array
3. Rebuild the 3x 1tb drives as a raid 0 array independent of the first array
4. install the OS to one of these arrays and essentially have a 4tb drive and a 3tb drive from the OS perspective

I don't want to sacrifice half of the 2tb drives to set up a 5 disk array. I get the sense that this is not possible due to the BIOS only being able to have 1 array through the onboard controller. If that's the case, can I buy a PCI raid controller to set up the first array(2x2tb reds), and then have the second array (3x 1tb) set up via onboard controller?

I'm very much new to the RAID game, so if anyone has recommendations on a good controller that would also be much appreciated. I'm just looking for good enough perf to run full 1080 media and gaming.

thanks!

 

[masteryoda34]

Would the following be at all possible:

1. Add the two 2tb reds to a raid 0
2. Copy all data from the 3x 1tb drives to the new raid array
3. Rebuild the 3x 1tb drives as a raid 0 array independent of the first array
4. install the OS to one of these arrays and essentially have a 4tb drive and a 3tb drive from the OS perspective

Should be entirely possible, however I wouldn't recommend raid 0 for storage volumes. You do realize that if 1 drive in a raid 0 array fails, you will lose ALL data on that array, right? I would not take that chance considering how sketchy multi terabyte drives have been recently. But yes, it would work.

 

[Zxian]

Yes. It will work. I have my two SSDs and my two scratch disks setup as independent RAID0 arrays. As masteryoda34 said though, don't use RAID0 for general storage.